Online privacy

US Capitol, East Capitol Street, NE and 1st Street, NE, DC, 20515, United States

AnonOps, a group affiliated with the online activist group known as Anonymous, posted what it says are the private cell phone numbers and email addresses for 22 Republican members of Congress in a bid to push for President Trump's impeachment, reigniting the use of hacked information in US political battles.

The current network neutrality fight is really a wide-ranging power struggle between internet service providers and internet activists, between Republicans and Democrats. The battle is only partly about the ends—a free internet—and much more about the means: potential heavy regulation of ISPs as monopolies. Classifying ISPs as “common carriers,” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, means they could be regulated like monopolies.

Verizon Communications, 140 West St, New York, NY, 10007, United States

Fourteen of the biggest US tech companies filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Aug 14 supporting more rigorous warrant requirements for law enforcement seeking certain cell phone data, such as location information. In the statement, the signatories—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft among them—argue that the government leans on outdated laws from the 1970s to justify Fourth Amendment overreach. One perhaps surprising voice in the chorus of protesters? Verizon.

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

Today, faced with serious economic and political dysfunction, we are in need of another round of deep institutional renewal: a Third Republic. We need to coalesce around how best to create shared prosperity. This necessitates increasing productivity — the growth of which has been weak of late — and creating more well-paid jobs as well as finding better ways of redistributing the gains from new technologies and globalization in the fairer way.

More than a dozen high technology companies and the biggest wireless operator in the United States, Verizon, have called on the US Supreme Court to make it harder for government officials to access individuals' sensitive cellphone data.

Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Many experts say lack of trust will not be a barrier to increased public reliance on the internet. Those who are hopeful that trust will grow expect technical and regulatory change will combat users’ concerns about security and privacy. Those who have doubts about progress say people are inured to risk, addicted to convenience and will not be offered alternatives to online interaction. Some expect the very nature of trust will change.

Lawyers representing a man convicted of six robberies in the Detroit area have now filed their opening brief at the Supreme Court in one of the most important digital privacy cases in recent years. This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant?

The Walt Disney Co secretly collects personal information on some of their youngest customers and shares that data illegally with advertisers without parental consent, according to a federal lawsuit filed late last week in California.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a prominent privacy rights watchdog, is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a new Google advertising program that ties consumers’ online behavior to their purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.

LinkedIn may very well succeed in its effort to stop a San Francisco (CA) startup from using the data of its members. But the Sunnyvale (CA) company, now a division of Microsoft, has certainly lost the moral high ground.

One out of every seven people on the planet uses the messaging app WhatsApp every day, according a recent blog post from the company. A billion people a day send messages to their friends and family on a service that's end-to-end encrypted by default, up from a billion per month from 2016.

University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94708, United States

More than 50 percent of Google Play apps targeted at children under 13—we examined more than 5,000 of the most popular (many of which have been downloaded millions of times)—appear to be failing to protect data.

A bipartisan bill, the ECPA Modernization Act, has been introduced that would update communications privacy law to protect cloud storage. It is the latest effort by the Senate to address the issue after the House voted overwhelmingly to protect older data.

The purpose for this document is assist risk managers in making decisions with respect to privacy when sharing cybersecurity information. It builds upon the previously published basic principles by outlining actions to promote efficient and effective information sharing while minimizing the impact on privacy interests. Importantly, this document reflects the contributions of industry, civil society, and the government. This document supplements ISAO 300-1 Introduction to Information Sharing, Section 9 Information Privacy.

Where smart technologies are concerned, the expectation of privacy extends only from the consumer to machine. Once the machine communicates with an outside server – even where data is sent to a server controlled by the product's manufacturer – privacy is violated.

The Committee sent invitations to CEOs of leading tech companies, including Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix and broadband providers including Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Charter Communications, requesting they testify before the full committee.

General Court -- Court of Justice of the European Union, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The European Union’s top court is set to decide whether the bloc’s “right to be forgotten” policy stretches beyond Europe’s borders, a test of how far national laws can—or should—stretch when regulating cyberspace.

Sealed law enforcement requests to track Americans without a warrant through cellphone location records or Internet activity grew sevenfold in the past three years in the District, new information released by a federal judge shows.

Apparently, Facebook, Alphabet's Google, Apple, and other major technology firms are largely absent from a debate over the renewal of a broad US internet surveillance law, weakening prospects for privacy reforms that would further protect customer data.